Interactive Distributed Configuration

Interactive configuration is the concept of assisting a user in selecting values for parameters that respect given constraints. It was originally inspired by the product configuration problem with the emergence of the mass-customisation paradigm in product manufacturing, but has also been applied to other tasks requiring user interaction, such as specifying services or setting up complex equipment. The user-friendly requirements for complete, backtrack-free and real-time interaction makes the problem computationally challenging. In this paper we look at the concept of distributed configuration, where similar user functionality should be provided in a distributed environment, where knowledge about constraints and variables is fragmented over several nodes, each node exchanging information through message passing. We develop a theoretical model, formalise the problem, and suggest a solution approach that uses techniques from the area of Constraint Satisfaction and utilises a compilation scheme based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD) [1].